Correspondence between people by written documents carried by an intermediary from one person or place to another can be dated back nearly to the invention of writing. The first documented use of an organized courier service for the diffusion of written documents is in Egypt, where Pharaohs used couriers for the diffusion of their decrees in the territory of the State (2400 BC). The first credible claim for the development of a real postal system comes from Persia (present day Iran).
Mail assumed electronic format in 1965. E-mail started as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate with each other. E-mail was quickly extended to become ‘network e-mail’, allowing users to pass messages between different computers by at least 1966.
In recent years e-mail has become an indispensable business tool. E-mail has replaced “snail mail” for many business practices because it is faster, cheaper, and generally more reliable. In hard copy mail, people often record notes on pieces of paper for filing or for providing to others. These ‘others’ may receive carbon copies of the mail message along with these notes. The next evolution was the creation of the yellow “Post-It” sticky notes that are used on letters and other documents to transmit notes to the recipients of the letters or documents.
In present day e-mail compilation programs, the user is provided with options such as TO, CC, and BCC which prompts the user to enter the recipients' email address.
The abbreviation ‘CC’ refers to the practice of sending a message as a “carbon copy.” Typically this is for notification purposes. Typically, supervisory personnel are notified with ‘CC’. When a supervisor is ‘CC’ed, it may also imply approval with thoughts expressed in the email. For example, a secretary may send an email about an upcoming meeting. The secretary's name appears in the ‘from’ line and the supervisor is ‘CC’ed. Instructions, in addition to the main mail, if any, will have to be added in to the main mail itself mentioning special attention to the concerned persons.
The ‘CC’ recipients are revealed to all recipients. As this may not be desirable, depending on the situation, an alternative field, BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) is available for hidden notification. In common usage, ‘To’ field recipients are the primary audience of the message, ‘CC’ field recipients are others whom the author wishes to publicly inform of the message, and ‘BCC’ field recipients are those surreptitiously being informed of the communication. The sender may also want to add personal comments or instructions to the group of ‘BCC’ed recipients. Doing this in the main mail defeats the purpose of the ‘BCC’ field.
In multi-level organizations, emails are sent out in bulk; that is, multiple recipients receive an email sent from a single source. Typically, all the fields (TO, CC, BCC) are populated with addresses depending on the priority of the content, the addressee of the content, and/or the task of the content. If a need arises to send out instructions to a certain group, typically highlighted by the group of recipients as listed under the ‘CC’ field or by the group of recipients as listed under the ‘BCC’ field, the sender has to send additional emails apart from a copy of the main message or include the instructions in the main mail. However, incorporating the latter technique poses a threat with respect to privacy and security, and also may portray lack of etiquette.
Various techniques have been proposed in the prior art for appending notations or instructions to an email and then delivering the email to a recipient. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,713,780, 5,177,680 and 6,598,076 and U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 2006/0041625 and 2007/0233788 disclose systems for the delivery of email and/or attachments to selected recipients. However, none of these references solve the problem of providing for the appending of a note or instruction to an email that will be sent to or displayed by only a select portion of a group of recipients of the email.
What has been needed, and heretofore unavailable, is a system and method wherein notes or instructions may be appended to an email and then sent to addressees of the email in a manner where the appended notes or instructions are sent only to selected addressees, and the email without the appended notes or instructions are sent to the rest of an addressee list. Moreover, such a system will also provide for optimizing the task of sending out emails by selectively using the TO, CC, and BCC functionalities in conjunction with each other. The invention satisfies these and other needs.